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Thursday, December 11, 2014

Making Safety a Habit

Recently at a client’s site one of our consultants was
driving through the plant, reached their destination, and got out of the
vehicle. Just then, an employee of the client drove up next to them and asked
if our employee was wearing their seatbelt. The client’s employee saw our
employee driving around without a seatbelt, or at least that’s how it looked,
and drove out of his way to talk to our employee. What a good demonstration of
caring about safety – to drive out of your way to remind someone to wear their
safety equipment (in this case a seatbelt)! However, it turns out that our
employee was wearing his seatbelt. How did they know? Because putting on a
seatbelt was such a habit that to not put it on would have felt uncomfortable.
He simply puts on his seatbelt without thinking when he enters the vehicle.

The idea that we can take safety and make it into a habit
more broadly than in just the example above has a lot of intuitive appeal.
After all, making something a habit makes it easier to do the thing we’re
trying to do. In the case above, making putting on the seatbelt a habit makes
putting on a seatbelt relatively easy. The employee doesn’t have to expend much
cognitive resources in order to put on the seatbelt. In a manner of speaking,
you could say that habits change reality. Normally we think that with the
choice of doing something or not doing something, not doing something is the
easier of the two options. Habits can change that by making not doing the act
more difficult. Putting on a seatbelt is a largely passive process (it almost
just happens), whereas not putting on a seatbelt is active (it requires thought
and effort).

This is why many in the safety world have recommended
working to build safety habits in your organization. Imagine now in your
organization if safety were a habit. Everyone wears their PPE. Everyone follows
the procedures. Sounds great, right?

Actually…not so much.

This idea that safety can be reduced to merely being a habit
is an example of a number of big problems in the safety profession. First, the
belief that turning safety into a habit will give significantly benefit safety
performance provides a clue of where the person who has that belief thinks the
main problem in safety is – our employees’ brains. After all, what is a habit
but a way to do something without thinking? So, for turning safety into a habit
to be the solution, that means that problem is that our employees are thinking
for themselves. We need to squash out that thinking with conformity-building
habits.

This idea stems from a concept of management that is over
100 years olds called Taylorism. The idea is that workers cannot be trusted to
figure out the work for themselves, so managers must define the one best way to
do the job, train employees on that one best method, and the hold them
accountable to it. Essentially - managers are smart and workers are dumb. In
the present case, we define what habits we want the employees to have (the “one
best method”) and we lobotomize our employees by turning the method into a
habit.

On it’s face the idea is pretty dehumanizing, and therefore
demotivating. However, the added downside is that by deemphasizing our
employees’ ability to think we are taking away one of the most valuable aspects
of our employees – their minds. After all, without a mind, what good is a
human? We can find stronger, faster, and more precise animals in the world. But
the one thing that separates us is our creativity, our innovation, our ability
to adapt to such a wide range of circumstances. This feature of humanity is
responsible for all of our achievements. Why would we be so quick to squash it
at our first opportunity?

The second problem with the safety profession that the
movement to turn safety into a habit demonstrates is our desire to oversimplify
our world. Turning safety into a habit makes for a great sound bite, but even
if it were possible and ethically desirable, from a safety perspective, it’s a
really bad idea. One can think of plenty of examples where habits are causal
factors in accidents. Think about it – doing something habitually is doing
something without thinking. Can you think of an accident where an operator
acting without thinking was one of the causal factors? That was an accident
where habits were part of the cause!

Habits work in situations where nothing significant changes.
That’s why we don’t have to think, only act. But our world, our organization,
our work environment is constantly changing, sometimes slowly, sometimes
drastically. Habits not only won’t work in such situations, in such situations
habits can be deadly.

Now, don’t get us wrong – there are situations where habits
are good. There are a small subset of behaviors that are so basic, and so rote
that there will never need to be a meaningful deviation. For example, one would
be very hard pressed to come up with a circumstance where putting on a seatbelt
when one is provided is a bad idea. But the idea that safety is just about
making habits is dangerous, just like any other idea that presupposes that any
human action or inaction is always good or bad without due consideration of
context. The safety profession is notorious for oversimplifying human behavior
and it has to stop if we’re going to make any real progress.